June 9, 2008

Saturday night found Cristian and I towelling off after a quick dip in Barton Springs. A handful of other Austinites were there, taking advantage of the free hour before close. The diving board created a steady backdrop of rhythm to a quiet hum of conversation all around. Two kids who looked to be about 12 or 13 came ambling up the sidewalk and stopped to stand at the pool’s edge just in front of us. The water is as cold as it is blue, but the smaller one hesitated for only a moment before leaping in, t-shirt, flip-flops and all.

“That was dumb. He’s going to be cold with no dry shirt,” Cristian said. Two years of teaching middle school has given Cristian an eagle eye for the folly of youth.

The kid bobbed up fast as a cork and swam with choppy desperation for the stairs. He was back out of the water faster than he went in, but that didn’t stop him from shoving and heckling his friend, a giant, handsome lug of a boy. “You haven’t jumped in yet?! You wuss! Jump! Jump, you asshole!”

Before my concious mind was even aware I had made the decision to open my mouth, the words were out. “He hasn’t jumped in yet because the water is really fucking cold.” I said. “Lay off.”

Both kids looked at me in shock. Then the bigger kid looked back at the smaller kid and said, “Yeah, the water’s really fucking cold, asshole,” and cannonballed off the side. The smaller kid leaped after him. Cristian and I turned to leave.

“I can’t believe I just cursed in front of those kids. I didn’t even think about it until the words were out of my mouth,” I said. “It wasn’t even a conscious choice! I shouldn’t be let out of the house without a muzzle.”

“Really?” Cristian said, “You made me jealous. The cursing is what made that work. If I could curse in the classroom like that I’d get a lot more respect.” He squeezed my arm just above my elbow as we walked out the gate to the car, flip-flops squelching on the pavement. It was 93 degrees at nine forty five at night, and you could see bats flying under the orange glow of the parking lot’s high pressure sodium lights.

June 2, 2008

So I was in the middle of watching Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Saturday when I heard my phone ring from the other room. Even though it was smack in the middle of a sunny afternoon and I had two huge dogs on either side of me, I was worked up into enough of a lather to jump when I heard the phone. But then I was RELIEVED, because now I could pause the movie and give my adrenal glands a little break from pumping out the coritsol I would need should Bob leap out of the tv set and come after me.

I wrapped up the phone call and came back to the movie, which was smack in the middle of a terrifying long shot of an empty, featureless hallway in an office building. The florescent lighting and greenish hue of the hallway paint was menacing in a dreamlike way, and the shot just went on forever and ever and ever. There was an elevator bank and three doorways off the hallway, and no way to tell which one the monster would spring from. I scootched as far back into the couch as I could and marveled at David Lynch’s ability to pack such menace into a still shot of an empty hallway. STILL nothing happened. I realized my breath was shallow, and that I was clutching the remote to my chest as though it were some sort of breastplate.

Still nothing.

Still nothing.

Still nothing.

And then – suddenly – the screen turned black!

And the Sony logo began bouncing across it, from one side to the other.

And that would be when I realized that I’d been frozen in fear for at least two solid minutes in front of a paused movie.

All of this from an excellent article over at Salon.com about what drives the sexualization of very young girls in mainstream Western culture. I can barely wrap my brain around it. I keep coming back to the question of WHO IS BUYING THIS SHIT FOR THEIR DAUGHTERS/GRANDAUGHTERS/NIECES/FRIEND’S KIDS? Who? I want to know so that I can go out and beat them with a very large bat.

May 17, 2008

The kids next door are playing out back with open hearted sincerity, literally choking on their laughter as they run in clumsy loops. There is pride in the laughter too; a certain self-satifaction at having mastered humor, junior class. Their jib jabber is guaranteed inscrutable to anyone over 4 feet.

I can’t see them from inside where I’m cleaning the kitchen, but I hear it when their laughter turns into a group cheer. “FLUPPY!!!!!” they shriek and I peer out the window to see Fluppy happily standing up against the chain link to say hi. We periodically hand boxes of treats over the fence so the kids can throw them to the dogs when they’re out there. It’s become impossible to tell whether the kids are more enamoured of the dogs or the dogs of the kids. This feels right, almost prehistorically so.

Fluppy comes loping back into the kitchen. I toss her a treat from the jar. The kitchen’s clean; time to move on to the rest of the house.

May 16, 2008

We are hip deep in Heartworm Treatment Territory at 504 Sheraton these days, and lo, they are long days. June 27th cannot come soon enough. Keeping a young dog on “bed rest” for 10 weeks is the experiential equvalent of driving across the entire state of Kansas with a three year old child strapped in the back seat. THERE IS NO WINNING. There is only surviving.

Things Columbo likes to do:

run

jump*

gambol

wrestle

monitor the fenceline for intruders

bark at shit

eat (anything)

Things Columbo is allowed to do:

eat (dog food)

sleep

It is a festival of FAIL at our house these days, and there’s really not that much we can do about it. Lord knows I’d be gnawing on the upholstery too if I had no forebrain and was being kept indoors 23 1/2 hours a day, every day.

So far he’s done very little actual damage – lucky for us he seems to enjoy gumming more than ripping and shredding.

May 13, 2008

Thanks for all the comments on yesterday’s post. What I got from that overall is that, if I play my cards right, I can actually get free booze and cookies just for donating money that I wanted to donate anyway. You guys are smart!

Seriously, though, that post was not there to activate any sort of comparisoning or guilt complexing. I spend 99.99% of the money I have access to on me, me, me. I buy shit don’t need all the time just because it makes me happy, and I’m not going to apologize for putting my own happiness first – I’m a better person when I’m happy. Better as in able to give without feeling superior to other people or sorry for myself. My secret hope is that I will be able to hang on to the happiness and give up more of the stuff, but who the Hell knows if I’ll get there.

May 12, 2008

As we’ve grown older and hopefully wiser, Cristian and I have made it more of a priority to live in accordance with certain principles that we’ve identified as important to us. We noticed an increase in these types of concerns around about the time we moved in together – who knows why, in his case I think most of the time he’s either trying to save money or show me up, but I can’t really SAY that when he’s arguing passionately to turn the thermostat up to 82 for the summer*.

There’s an interesting essay here that touches on the point that loving another person intimately should also affirm or awaken a more general “love for humanity” within each partner. I do think that, for me, this is definitely a major factor in my new willingness – eagerness – to give. I am literally the very, very last person on Earth who can claim love for the masses – and if you doubt that, please let me know and I’ll invite you along on my morning commute – but I do feel rich enough right now, in all senses of the word, to want to live well, to live more lightly on the planet and to provide assistance and support to people who need it**.

But. We don’t make THAT much money. Ideally, we’d tithe 10% of our total income, but right now we can barely do 5. And who the Hell do we give it to? Conversation at our house last night was just ABSURD:

Dana: Oh, and I wanted to mention the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. They’re incredible, what they’ve accomplished, and it would make me happy to do something on behalf of Dad.

Cristian: Uuuuuhhhhh. This is impossible.

Dana: Either honor Dad and fight a cancer that eats you up from inside your own bones, or support doctors who are flying in to provide medical care to people in war torn countries…..which, I have to say, Dad would not be against.

So, I am turning to my readers. How do you decide who to donate to? Do you donate just a little to a lot of places? A lot to one or two? Wait until you’re asked by friends or family doing fundraisers? Advice, suggestions, feedback welcome.

*We settled on 80. I suspect that’s what he was going for in the first place, but I will overlook the deliberate manipulation and instead focus on how hard he has to strategize and work for the compromise…..

**I sound like Pollyanna’s codependent sister here, right? I have a lot of friends and coworkers who did not need to land a good boyfriend/girlfriend to become mindful of their place on the planet, and they have my respect and admiration. And I know a lot of people in relationships who don’t worry about the welfare of the rest of humanity – they take good care of each other, and that’s enough. They have my respect and admiration, too. The take away for me is that, for the first time, it’s pretty painless to give my time and money away. Thanks to my relationship with Cristian, I can act out of a place of love, not guilt. In my opinion, guilt is never a reason to ever do anything, unless you’re making specifics amends to a specific person.

***Now I sound like Pollyanna’s cynical bitch of an Aunt. I worked for a domestic violence shelter back in the day. They do need money, but the creepy, creepy truth is, a beaten woman attracts more sympathy than a poor one. Draw whatever cultural meaning you may……………….

If it hadn’t been for the dedication of people like the Lovings, relationships like Cristian’s and mine would face the level of disrespect and harrassment that queers of all stripes face right now. I do believe that someday, under our Constitution, the freedom to marry or not marry any person, regardless of gender, will reside with the individual, beyond the infringement of the State.